The squared slacks transformation in nonlinear programming

In this short paper, we recall the use of squared slacks used to transform inequality constraints into equalities and several reasons why their introduction may be harmful in many algorithmic frameworks routinely used in nonlinear programming. Numerical examples performed with the sequential quadratic programming method illustrate those reasons. Our results are reproducible with state-of-the-art implementations of the methods concerned and mostly serve a pedagogical purpose, which we believe will be useful not only to practitioners and students, but also to researchers.